1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony such as digital network telephony (DNT) and Internet Protocol network telephony (IPNT), and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for serving local media into active telephony sessions.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of telephony, the Internet has become an important network for carrying digital network telephony services. For enterprise telephony users, it has become popular to subscribe to hosted telephony services that will provide all of the communications services and capabilities to the subscribing enterprise while maintaining the telephony equipment and software in the network alleviating the responsibility of the enterprise to host or maintain expensive equipment and software.
More recently Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become a very popular method of voice communications. Carriers provide private branch exchange (PBX) services including VoIP where session initiation protocol (SIP) is used to create and teardown telephony sessions. In this regard, media services that define telephony state events like music on hold (MOH), ring tone, etc. are provided over realtime transport protocol (RTP). That entire media comes into the enterprise over a shared bandwidth connection such as a public section of the Internet. One problem with a lot of media such as MOH is that it uses shared bandwidth and represents a high cost to the subscribing enterprise.
Therefore, what is clearly needed in a hosted SIP PBX environment is a system and methods for localizing telephony media to the subscriber premise. A system such as this would lower the bandwidth requirements over the limited portion of the carrier network.